Paranormia

Witches: The San Francisco Killers

Paranormia

Show Notes

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Michael and Suzan Carson drifted through the American West, moving between communes, shared apartments, and marijuana farms. They changed their names, adopted a patchwork belief system of mysticism and religion, and came to see themselves as warriors in a hidden war. Between 1981 and 1983, they killed three people and insisted their victims were witches. This episode traces how an ordinary couple built a shared delusion powerful enough to justify killing, and why the story has been remembered as something occult rather than what it was: a case study in belief, control, and the human capacity to turn ideology into violence.

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